As a web developer, sometimes my code can fail in some situations. Maybe I coded it wrong and then it’s my fault, but I always debug it before to minimize this case. There can be other reasons: old browsers, misuse of the tools, …

And when it fails on the customer’s browser, he or she will send me an email to tell me what happened. I have to admit that some of them write very good debugging guides: they tell me the URL, the browser’s version and try to explain all the previous circumstances. But others don’t.

There are times that I get a mail saying something like “there’s an error in the website. It’s raining outside, maybe high humidity is bad…”. This may seem like an exaggeration, and it is. But as I don’t know anything about mechanics, when I take the car to the garage I explain what I see or listen, not what I think it happened if it hasn’t crashed.

I can remember one time I entered the garage and said “something’s wrong with the engine, it sounds terrible”. The “terrible sound” was the antenna: it was too high and wind sounded this way. The mechanic knew it as he saw the car, and he only had to move the antenna down. And sometimes I feel like him.

“There’s something wrong with the app, when I write numbers over 20.000 the calculations are not working”. It can be because that old IE6 has some problems with the javascript that eliminates a thousand separator that’s not the american (default) comma, for example, and it could fail with 10.001, but you haven’t tried.

As I made this, I should know why is it failing at first sight. And I’m always going to ask you to reboot the computer and try again. But if you tell the doctor where are you injuried but not what to do, maybe it’s the time to do the same with computers.